What if you built yourself a shrine and nobody ever came? Death, nouveau-riche style, by Francis X. Clines in the IHT:

The modern era of McMansions and grossly luxurious SUVs has now been extended to sales of single- family mausoleums across the United States. Prices are $250,000 and up, way up, depending on extras like a meditation room, a granite patio and gilded marquee lettering. Can talk of a mausoleum bubble be far behind?

The most restful spot for contemplating this new development is Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, the verdant 168-year-old burial ground that made an art form of nouveau-mort flamboyance for Victorian New Yorkers with a yen to overlook Manhattan from eternity.

Green-Wood is a pastoral 500-acre village of the dead with a hilltop view of ongoing life that sweeps from the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building, from tenement to townhouse.

But the plainly morbid attraction is the residents, the formerly fabled and wealthy New Yorkers who still stir curiosity from the grave. (If Boss Tweed, the great plunderer of City Hall, suffered prison and ruin, how could he afford perpetual care at Green-Wood?)
In the mausoleum boom, one Florida dealer stressed the ultimate buyer's lure: "I'm really significant in this world."

Comments

> "I'm really significant
> in this world."

While no afficionado, my favorite showbiz graveyard in this town is in the one behind the westwood moviehouse on Wilshire. Buddy Rich rests within a few feet of Marilyn Monroe, and other formerly big names crowd the lawn (without blazing a memory for blog commenters years later). But you won't miss the Hammer mausoleum... It's prouder even than the Oxy building (with adjacent, eponymous museum) that sits across the street.

People have always been arrogant. I think the problem is that health is so good nowadays that illness and death can be regarded (for several decades at least) as a foolishness that ensnares lesser spirits. For all of human life up until the last century or so, everybody knew and loved people who died... And died young, and needlessly, and horribly. It was (and is) that kind of planet. But a lot of average people have come to see the rewarding context of their lives (contemporary, robust American longevity) as a function of their own excellence, and don't want to think about it ending.

That happens with democratic capitalism, too. People think it happens here because of some organic excellence in our own dear hearts. This is probably not the case....

Crid
at April 27, 2006 2:14 AM

I'm of the mind that if you're really good, you don't have to tell people.

I love that graveyard too, Crid. I met Audrey Wilder there once (she was tidying up Billy's plot). Very stylin' lady.

And dude, I love your term "organic excellence." Bill and Ted would be, like, proud.

FYI: My health is good, but I think about death almost every day. There's a line in the Bible (sorry, Amy) that sums it up nicely:

"Teach us to number our days, so that we may apply our hearts to wisdom."

Lena
at April 27, 2006 8:17 AM

I love that graveyard too, Crid. I met Audrey Wilder there once (she was tidying up Billy's plot). Very stylin' lady.

And dude, I love your term "organic excellence." Bill and Ted would be, like, proud.

FYI: My health is good, but I think about death almost every day. There's a line in the Bible (sorry, Amy) that sums it up nicely:

"Teach us to number our days, so that we may apply our hearts to wisdom."

Lena
at April 27, 2006 8:18 AM

In the past, Spielberg was a pell-mell philanthropist, and he was eager to have his name prominently attached to his gifts. These days, he is far more circumspect. ''A rabbi sat me down,'' he explains, ''and told me, 'You know, if you put your name on everything, it goes unrecognized by God.' I said, 'Really?' So over the last 10 years, 80 percent of what I give is anonymous and the other 20 percent is only where my name can help attract other moneys.''

According to my parents, I was conceived at the base of the Eiffel Tower, late at night, when my mom travelled to Paris to meet her future in-laws. Personally I don't know if they're right, but it has always made for a great story, especially to hear them tell it.

I plan to return full circle-- my husband and sons know they are to spread my ashes at the base of the tower. My oldest plans to do it in the style of Andy in the "Shawshank Redemption"--through a hole in his jeans' pocket. I'd love to see him walking in a big circle, with bits of me falling out over his sneakers...

bev
at April 27, 2006 5:29 PM

Your kids might not distribute your ashes according to your wishes, Bev. I have an old friend back east whose dad asked her to sprinkle some of his ashes around the TKTS booth in NYC (TKTS is a place to get discount tickets for Broadways shows. Her dad was a big theatre lover.) My friend is a basic scientist, and as she was getting ready to carry out his request, she started worrying about the suspiciousness of a scientist sprinkling a white powder around in public in post-9/11 New York. She ended up doing something else with that portion of his ashes.

I've always been of the opinion that when I die, harvest whatever organs you can from my body and throw the remainder in one of those body farms where it will decompose. I find the whole embalming process ghoulish.

For what it's worth, I've heard there are places where you can take those ashes and get them compressed into a diamond. Gives a whole new meaning to 'family jewels.'